Two very different writers to team up at UCI

Kim Dower and Karen Karbo have a history that predates their successes as poet and author, having met years ago when both women had their first jobs in L.A. as secretaries for a high-powered Hollywood talent agency.

“We were sort of like Lucy and Ethel,” Dower says. “We got in a lot of trouble together.

“I told her I used to write poetry and she told me that one day she was going to move to Portland and become a writer, and that’s basically what happened.”

On Tuesday, Karbo and Dower come to UC Irvine to read from their newest work. While their books might at first seem an odd pairing – Dower’s “Slice of the Moon” is a collection of poems, while Karbo’s “Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life” is her latest take on an iconic woman – actually fit together well, Dower and Karbo say.

“I thought it would be really fun because ‘Julia Child Rules’ is a book about adoring life and food and all that,” Dower says. “And for whatever reason there is food in every single one of my poems. As a matter of fact I was going to call the book ‘Snacking Before Dawn.’”

Adds Karbo: “On one basic level no one needs poetry or an excellently prepared meal, but on the other hand we probably need that all the time.

“They’re not only nourishing to our bodies but they’re nourishing to our spirits, and none of us can get enough of that.”

‘Julia Child Rules’

Karbo grew up in Whittier watching “The French Chef,” Child’s groundbreaking cooking show, with her mother, who’d been a fan of Child’s cookery from way back.

“So much that Julia experienced as a ‘California hayseed,’ which is what she called herself, I had identified with,” Karbo says.

So after writing “How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great,” Karbo says she proposed making Child the next in what became a series of books on lessons drawn from the lives of “kick-ass women.” Her publisher was cool on the idea – the bestseller “Julie and Julia” had come out not long before – so Karbo wrote about Coco Chanel instead.

A few years later, the same dance, only this time the movie version of “Julie and Julia” had just debuted, so Karbo picked Georgia O’Keeffe. And after that book arrived in 2011?

“They said, ‘So who else do you have?’ and I said, ‘Julia Chi-i-i-ld?’ I had been putting her on a platter and putting her under their nose for so many years.”

She was drawn to Child in part because of a rebelliousness that might not be obvious when considering Child at first glance.

“Even though she was sort of this foreign-service man’s wife and she wore her pearls and her little skirt and looked very much like a very tall housewife, which was what she was, she really did have deep in her a rebellious spirit,” Karbo says. “She was a pretty big rule breaker and the degree of that surprised me. Then when I thought about it made sense, because to think that you could take something as adored and revered and ancient as French cuisine and attempt to interpret it for an American housewife? That’s pretty bold.”

‘Slice of Moon’

Dower credits Karbo with encouraging her to make a serious return to poetry after years away from it as she built her Los Angeles-based literary publicity firm. Since her debut collection, “Air Kissing On Mars,” was published in 2010 she’s continued to mine the muse within

“With poetry it’s not like fiction or even non-fiction where you have an idea and you sit down to write it,” she says. “The poems are just flying, like crazy birds, crashing into you all the time.”

Around the same time her first book came out her mother became ill, dying a year or so later. The experiences and emotions of that time surfaced in the poetry she created.

“Poem’s are not necessarily autobiographical but they come from some experience that you have, or something that moves the poet,” Dower says. “My mother’s condition at the time and my dealing with it was very moving. So for me the thread was my mother’s death. Even though there’s a lot of other poems in there and many of them are funny, all of them have a little bit of her in them.”

Asked what drives her to pursue poetry, Dower first jokes that “poets all do it for the money,” before saying it’s actually a pursuit that calls its creators to its service.

Recently, writer and radio personality Garrison Keillor picked one of her new poems, “They’re taking chocolate milk off the menu,” to read on “The Writer’s Almanac” radio program and podcast he hosts. It was an honor that thrilled her (even though, tsk, tsk, he called her Dover not Dower in his introduction) and reminded her once more of the ways in which a poet might earn her due.

“I realized that one little 12-line poem can change the way people see something,” Dower says. “See it differently. Feel something from it. And I guess that’s why we write poetry.”